As many of you are aware, I have lately been working on a Metamorphosis fanfic, so when I hear there is a Kafka exhibit at the Morgan, I feel a moral obligation to go. The exhibit, the marketing email said, featured original hand-written notes and manuscripts. “I will go Thursday afternoon after work,” I think to myself, “maybe it will inspire me to churn out a few words.” Thursday evening rolls around but I end up getting a drink, or maybe two, with someone. Then, the plumber is in my house Friday morning to fix the radiator that’s been broken for a while. I had been avoiding cleaning up the apartment in anticipation of the plumber visit, so it is, of course, in a state of utter mess, so I spend that evening cleaning up. How a light cleanup of a miniscule studio leaves someone exhausted and hungry and mad at the world, I cannot fathom, but this is also the moment I realize I only have enough contents in my fridge to last one more meal. Saturday, I wake up early at 11, and I make it a priority to restock provisions. By the time I get to the cheaper grocery store (which is a bit further than the more expensive grocery store), I hit the weekend shopping crowd. By the time I clear the checkout, it’s already 2pm, the sun is on the way out, and I am sweaty and unshaven. As I shower and shave, I suddenly remember about Kafka and how I had told everyone I was definitely going to the exhibit. This thing was becoming a chore in itself. I mumble some curses at myself and put the agenda on the TODO list for the next day, right between laundry and lunch. The next day, I make it to the exhibit, and once there, realize that Kafka actually wrote in German and I can neither speak nor read that language (except for a few words like Hofbrau, Hefeweizen, Kolsch). I don’t understand Kafka’s scribbles, but you can tell they come from someone sad and scrawny. Thankfully, the museum had translated some of the saddest ones. Some of them were from deathbed; those, I try to avoid as much as possible (I have a thing against reading things written from the deathbed). I then remember what got me interested in Kafka in the first place: we are both kind of fastidious with food and drinks. The insect in Metamorphosis only eats rotten food, the hunger artist puts up a fasting performance because he literally does not like anything he eats, and Kafka himself spent the last years of his life in a sanatorium drinking only beer, weighing only 99 pounds. “Not a heavy drinker, just a passionate drinker,” they used to say of him. As I am contemplating these thoughts, I spot a man with a paisley scarf staring ponderously at a translated sentence on the wall. A drop of tear was welling in his eye and he was clutching the hands of a little girl next to him. This is what was staring at:
“He scavenges the leftovers from his own table; that makes him better fed than the others for a little while, but he also forgets how to eat at a table, and so the supply of leftovers dries up.”
Now this quote, I think, is kind of short-sighted. Maybe it made sense in pre-war Prague back in the day, but America, and in particular New York City, is plentiful with leftovers. Once the leftover in your own table dries up, there are other tables, other people’s dinners to scavenge. A hundred million households in this country, a hundred million or so tables to scavenge. You can’t take ten steps in Hell’s Kitchen without stumbling onto someone’s leftovers! And delicious too! What a dumbass!